This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. We were called today on an office ac, not working, so this is their office. Ac, uh, it's running when we got up here. The air coming out is not very warm and let's go ahead and open this guy up and have a look in here and i can see it.

It is iced up. Look at that: oh yeah, solid top to bottom. So that's a problem. Filters are pretty plugged up too holy mojoli.

It's a lot of ice. All right! Well, we're gon na get this defrosted and try to figure out. What's going on all right, we got this guy opened up and uh. The belt is still there whether or not the motor is running we're waiting, motor's running okay.

So so we know that that's good the indoor blower wheel, though holy moly is that thing dirty. It is bad caked up um and then, on top of that, these air filters aren't helping the situation because they're barely letting any air through. So that's a problem all right. We got to get this defrosted first, so the first thing we're going to do to get this defrosted is simply disconnect power to the compressor.

There's our compressor contactor. So we disconnected power we're going to turn it on put this panel on and we're going to, let it run um without the filter door on just pulling in the outside air. So let's throw the panel on and then we'll leave the filters off that way. It can draw hot air through here and it'll melt that and at the same time they said their entire kitchen was a little bit warm, so we're going to check out their main kitchen ac 2, which is a newer carrier.

So we'll check this out and see if this guy's working while we're waiting for that and then we'll end up having to get filters too. Probably, and we might even pull that blower assembly. But we got to figure out why it was frozen up for sure. So.

Open up the kitchen ac and our blowers running. Look at these filters, though man. No wonder they're saying it's warm in the kitchen. These are a hundred percent plugged, so we'll definitely be getting them some new filters, that's uh, pretty bad! I'm surprised! It's not iced! Uh up been about 40 minutes.

I took a lunch. Evaporator is nice and clear: it's actually not that dirty either um. For the most part, it looks like most of the water went down the drain, which is good, so we're gon na go ahead and power. This guy down we're gon na go ahead and clean it, because it's filthy, this condenser in here it's just filthy filthy, so go ahead and do a proper cleaning on it and then we'll evaluate see if we can figure out why it potentially iced up.

I went ahead and popped the top on it. It's not that big of a deal one person can do it. You can see how dirty this blower wheel is and look at this inside condenser that nobody gets to and then on top of that it's a double road condenser. So it's gon na be dirty inside still a little remnants of ice on the compressor, so we're gon na get this uh cleaned up once we get it cleaned up, we'll get it kind of degreased a little bit, because it's kind of greasy in here then we'll Be able to evaluate the unit, but it's so dirty that we can't really do anything else.

So we're gon na knock this out. Look at the heat exchanger we permanently have the heat turned off, turned off the gas valve disconnected at the limit switches. But look at that just caked in there man and this nonsense. What i don't know what is going on there someone's trying to make a solution to the wires rubbing out um.

This economizer is disconnected so, while i'm in here i'm gon na go and rip all this wiring out. So that way we don't got this big old mess of crap over here. So i'll pull the blower assembly we're gon na be lucky. If this thing doesn't vibrate to all hell after i clean it, sometimes these things get so you know caked up that when you clean them, they've been self-balanced with all the grease.

Normally i'd say you know you want to be careful about the bearings and stuff and while i'll still be a little bit careful there's only so much you can do with this much neglect. So i've got the uh refrigeration technologies, coil spraying gun right here. The foam sprayer and i've got the blue venom pack in here just kind of spray it on. Let it sit and then uh, we'll kind of spin it around it's sitting in water.

Let it sit and then we'll give it a rinse and then we'll start rinsing. The unit too, as far as the ac goes we're gon na rinse, the big stuff, the big chunks off first and then we'll get some coil cleaner on there. The rinse like this is going to get majority of it off also get that ice off too. So we'll get majority of the big stuff off this way and then you know get the coil cleaner on there and really really get in there and clean that coil.

This guy's still soaking over there, letting that degreaser really penetrate we are using the brightener cleaner. So it should break down a lot of that grease, but look at those big old chunks coming off that thing. Man look at all this man. This is gon na, be the satisfying one, because this stuff is just caked on here.

That's nuts, how thick that stuff is rinse! All that out also got to be careful because sometimes they'll drill holes down through the unit see that when they put the electrical down through there, so it's not gon na be 100 water tight. But again we got ta clean it, so we're gon na have to deal with whatever happens here, try to get it rinsed as best as possible. I just dumped it look at all that stuff just running out of this blower assembly right here. Everything coming i mean it's not even i'm gon na have to do a couple more rinses and it's pretty nasty the chunks coming out of it pretty crazy.

What neglect will do you know, went ahead and put some cleaner on the evaporator and we're just carefully rinsing. It not overflowing the drain pan and it's coming out pretty pretty dirty too. It's pretty nasty so give it a good rinse. We still haven't even gotten any cleaner on that we're just slowly rinsing this guy.

It's getting a lot better and doing the evap first. This guy isn't coming clean so down in here. This is like caked on grease and i'm having to scrape like every single vein and it's just caked in there. So i called the supply house and they have a pre-built assembly.

So my tech's going to pick that up right now, so i'm going to keep cleaning the unit and he should be back with the blower assembly, then we'll put it all back together and hope. There's nothing else wrong! It's insane! What's coming out of this coil right now, it's just pure black gunk, we'll give it a good, solid, wrench inside and out and we'll rinse the whole or the hole inside out and we'll get started on redoing the economizer wiring. So i got all the economizer wiring ripped back, it's all right there, it's all extra crap. So all that we need to do is the call for y1 comes into number two on the lockout board, and then it comes out of number three runs through the pressure controls through the freeze, stat and then comes back to the compressor contactor.

So it's still using the lockout board, all the safeties are still intact. All we're doing is just disconnecting the economizer that was already disconnected. It was just disconnected over on the other end, with all the wires you know in the way, so i got a brand new blower assembly, all nice and purty put together we're gon na put the pulleys on uh we're gon na replace this pulley, because it's worn Out and we're just reassembling the unit wiring is all done for the pressure, controls and everything so just a little bit at a time, all right we're all back together, we're ready to fire it up a couple things number one: this unit needs some love. Okay needs a new heat.

Exchanger needs a new blower motor bracket. We didn't get that um, the electrical yeah. You know, there's a lot of weird stuff going on in there. You know i don't like these wire nuts and stuff, but we've got an aftermarket.

Condenser fan motor, not it's it's kind of okay, but i don't like all these funky wires and stuff, but it is what it is: i'm not going to change the motor just because now, if the motor had a short or something like that, i'd change the motor And go oem, but i don't really have a reason to so. I hooked it all back up, um economizers, bypass wirings clean up just a little bit we're kind of ready. Now something we need to think about. This thing is so greasy and so dirty that we're going to blow dirt down into the building, so we got to go down there and slowly turn this on and kind of bump it and make sure we don't just fill the kitchen up with gree or with Uh dirt dust: you know we don't want to blow it onto their food and stuff.

So we got to be careful about that and then we got to figure out why it was frozen up more than likely just because the air filters were completely plugged. But we'll go through the units operation, so we're allowed to run 5.2 amps we're running 3.6, so we're under on current, but we left it the way that it was. We didn't change anything so at this point, we're going to jump it out and get cooling going and then test. The condenser fan motor the fact that it's an aftermarket motor oftentimes people won't install the right size.

So we're going to test that to make sure that's good and then we'll probe up on the unit and check all the charge and all that junk. So my unit kept going off on lockout, so to figure out where the problem was. I disconnected the lockout board and ran directly through the pressure controls and what i'm getting is that i've got a call of 25 volts - okay, 25 volts, but i'm not getting 25 volts all the way to the contactor, i'm only getting 19 volts to the contactor. So we're losing some voltage somewhere something's going on.

So what we're gon na do is isolate each pressure, control and figure out which pressure controls the potential problem, so you've got low and high pressure here. Our problem is on the high pressure control because my low pressure control has 25 volts coming out of it right and then, if we get onto the high pressure control, which is this guy, if i can get in there there we go. That's the high pressure control. We're only getting 17 18 volts running through the high pressure, so we have a failed high pressure control again, it's kind of weird, because that would have nothing to do with it icing up and the icing up.

You would think that the freeze stat would have caught that, but i pulled the freestyle out of the picture because i thought that was the problem when it isn't necessarily the problem. So we're gon na end up wiring this all back in, but we might have to put in a high pressure control because i don't know if it's potentially a weak transformer which can happen. I didn't actually install the high pressure control. I have one right here.

This is an aftermarket one, but it's an auto reset, so it'll be fine um, and so i just hooked it up right here and let's see if the compressor contactor pulls right in or if we still have the same voltage issue so we're turning it on and It turned right on so it looks like it's just a high pressure control failure, but just for giggles just to make sure it's not a fluke, we're gon na wire back in the old one and make sure it still does the same thing all right. The old one's wired back in and yep, it's not doing anything so yeah. It looks like it's a bad high pressure control is the problem all right. So this is what we're doing.

We've got a high pressure control, there's a schrader below it. It's already on and tightened there's a schrader depressor in that and there's a schrader here. We're gon na go ahead and put it on that high side port right there twist it on real, quick and just do a hot swap or whatever you want to call it right there so take a little bit of nylog and put it right here just to Make sure that the flare spins, nice and smooth okay there's already a teeny bit of dialogue on there? Okay, just like that and then uh actually gon na loosen it and tighten it right there, because when i straighten it out, it's gon na tighten even more. So it's gon na be a little tricky.

Let's see what we can do here, that should be good, should be good and then we'll just run the wires back over we're not going to bother using the existing wires, because we don't know if there's a problem with those too so we'll just run these over. To the connection, on the other side, all right, so we wired back into the lockout board. So power comes from y1 on this blue wire right here into the lockout board on number two runs through the lockout board then comes out of the lockout board into the freeze stack out of the freeze stat into the low pressure control out of the low pressure Control into the high pressure control and then out of the high pressure control into the compressor contactor. Now, if everything's correct, we should turn on when i flip this there we go we're back on and running, and everything is good now a couple things.

I want to bring up we're going to probe up on this guy, but i did end up moving the freeze. Stat because it wasn't turning off whether or not it's faulty, i don't know, but i moved it lower on the coil, because it was all the way at the top where sometimes maybe the ice isn't at. So i moved it to the middle of the coil um, but now we're going to probe up on the unit and test the charge and see what's going on with it. This does not look horrible um, superheats, decent pressures are still kind of stabilizing out.

I'm not hating the charge, i mean it's pretty darn good temperature splits a little high. I would suspect that we've got some ductwork issues for sure, but i mean that's pretty darn good. So the next thing we need to check is we are assuming that the filters are the reason that this thing iced out, but we don't know that to be 100 sure i'll. Tell you, too, that the outdoor air damper was open pretty wide and the outside air filters were also plugged, so it had plugged outside air filters and plugged return air filters.

It wasn't letting any airflow into that coil. So it's a very good possibility. It's just the plugged up filters that caused it to ice up, but we need to go down to the thermostat and make sure that it'll actually turn off from the thermostat, because it was running when we got up here. So we know that it was telling it to turn on, but we don't know that it'll tell it to turn off all right after it's been running even longer we're looking a lot better.

Now, some things i'm going to tell you. I am mixing some outside air, so that is affecting my td. Okay, now look at my temp split now, because i opened up the outside air damper back to where it was so you're mixing a little bit of that. Also because i opened up the outside air damper, look at my temperature target versus what it is and that's just because my my air probe is getting a little more outside air than the actual building air.

So airflow looks a little wonky but super heat's on the low side. I still think we might have an airflow, a slight airflow issue on this guy, so we're going to go down and quickly investigate to see if the return air is plugged up or anything like that, and then also we're going to test the thermostat. But i mean it's looking pretty darn good and it obviously the the um temperature split got a lot worse, a lot higher. Once i opened up the outside air damper, so we always mix a little bit of outside air on this unit.

So look at those returns. Man, those things are dirty. You know them clean those things a little bit all right, uh. We know it turns off.

We just turned it off at the thermostat. We also set the time on the thermostat and made sure it was set right. It's set for 72 degrees, i'm not seeing anything else. I mean obvious ductwork issues, but if i tried these commercial customers don't ever want to fix the duct work issues.

It's it's not going to happen, so they just deal with it. Um yeah this guy's working. So we're going to wrap this up, we're just going to take a quick temperature split on this kitchen ac because they were complaining about that. But it's been running it's hard away since we got here so we changed the filters.

Everything else looks good. We even checked the belt, so i think they're gon na be okay. One thing i will say we probably need to get this guy running. The evaporative cooler bet you it needs all new pads and yeah filters are plugged.

So that's a hole. They need a preventative maintenance here, we're not going to spend all day doing that right now, but we're just going to check tds on this guy real, quick and that's it we're wrapping it up all right. You can't just assume that it's the first thing you find all right in this situation. We walked up to the unit and it was frozen up.

Okay and the filters were plugged, so you know, but i didn't stop at the filters now. It ended up being the filters, but still we look past the obvious and we thoroughly go through the system. Okay, now uh it was i i should say it wasn't. Just the filters.

Okay, the indoor blower assembly was plugged. The outside air filters were plugged. The inside air filters were plugged, so it was a little bit of everything, but still i didn't just stop there. Okay and i tried to clean the blower assembly.

I did my best, but it was just too caked on with the grease - and i mentioned something in the video too, and it's completely true on these blower assemblies when they get caked up with grease, really really bad, especially if they've been running like that. For a very long time, they actually kind of self-balance themselves, okay, and something that i've noticed and what'll happen is, if you go and clean that thing and get all the grease off of it all of a sudden, the thing will be, even if it has the Weight still on it, the little balancing weights it'll just be way out of balance and start vibrating and shaking and everything, because it's been running with all that junk on it for so long that it's actually balanced out the wheel. However, it does it bending the aluminum or who knows, or steel or whatever it is, but so you got to be very careful and remember that if you're ever going to clean one of these, that's really impacted like this. One was just be understand that there's a very good possibility, you're going to have to change that blower wheel now on these smaller footprint carrier units.

If you guys don't already know they make a complete blower assembly that has everything you saw on it. It's already built and everything you buy it. It's rather inexpensive to be honest with you um the amount of time you would spend building that blower wheel. It's a lot cheaper, just to buy a pre-built one, but once you get past the five and the six ton units i haven't, had luck getting a pre-built blower assembly and they typically come in pieces.

So you got to order the wheel, the shaft, the bearings, the spider brackets. All the you know the housing and everything, but on these smaller units, it's super easy. So when we get impacted, blower wheels like this, i just go and pick up a new blower assembly. Now i luck out that in this situation the customer trusts my judgment and i didn't even have to ask for any approvals or anything like that.

I knew the unit needed to be fixed. I knew that the customers not buying or replacing units they're just going to town, they just tell us just to fix it, so we just knocked it out. Okay, but, like i said we didn't just stop at the dirty filters. We didn't just stop at the dirty blower.

We didn't just stop at the dirty condenser. We thoroughly went through everything. Now we also found that there was an issue with the high pressure control. Now that was an interesting intermittent issue, because the unit was iced up and running when we got there, but when i turned it back on all of a sudden, the high pressure control was problematic.

Okay, sometimes that stuff happens. Okay, it just does so that's why it's so important when you come out to these units that you thoroughly go through them in the situation of a new customer, and maybe i quoted this repair that would have sucked, because the high pressure control probably wouldn't have been Part of my quote, you know, so you have to make sure that your customers understand so in a situation like this. What i would do, if i had to quote this is i would go to the customer and i would say, hey the unit is so dirty that i can't troubleshoot anything until i clean the unit plain and simple. So then we clean it.

I would quote for that and then we come back and we diagnose, and then i would quote for that and then do the repair. Okay. So i'm never going to go in there and just say: oh yeah, it's dirty i'll, clean it and it'll be working, perfect and you'll be good to go because you never know what you're going to run into okay issues. You know it just becomes a pain in the butt and you know sometimes when you're cleaning stuff, you know stuff breaks, it happens when these units are so neglected.

In this way, it's inevitable that things are going to happen and things are going to come up. So it's so important that you have a good relationship with your customer there's a good communication there. They have trust in you. You have faith that they're going to pay their bills and all that stuff, because it just helps everything to go that much smoother.

Okay. So in the high pressure control diagnosing that the first thing that i thought when i saw there was some sort of an intermittent issue was, i thought the freeze stat was the problem. Okay - and so i simply eliminated that from the circuit and continued my troubleshooting using my meter, not just using a hot stick or a voltage detector, i'm actually checking voltage, because if i had a hot stick or something like that or a voltage detector, you know one Of those little pins or whatever it would have said, i had the voltage and i wouldn't have seen it so you have to measure it and be able to see that voltage. Okay - and i just went through the sequence of operation on the unit and troubleshooting the pressure controls - i understand how these work, so it was a lot.

It was rather easy for me to work my way through the troubleshooting process. I eliminated the free stat had the high and the low pressure measured voltage in measured voltage out of the low pressure. It was good, measured voltage into the high pressure. It was good and i didn't have proper voltage.

I was losing. I had a voltage drop across the high pressure control so instead of recovering the charge and sweating in a new high pressure control, i was able to use a swivel t. Okay and just tighten it down. If you do it correctly, the way that i did you do everything else you build it, and then you put the pressure control on there.

Whenever i install pressure controls the peanut style encapsulated ones like this. They have a schrader depressor in them, so i always put schraders in them now, if you're, using like an adjustable universal pressure, control like a johnson control, p70 lb 1c, i think, is a dual pressure. They do not have schrader depressors on them, so you can't put schraders in those ports. So just keep that in mind.

Okay, so we went ahead and replaced the pressure control. Uh the system was operational. It will, you know, make its way through the summer again. This is a kitchen office ac, so they'll never use heat in here, but it's important to know for safety reasons i permanently disconnected the heating.

I don't want any possibility of that heat accidentally. Turning on with all that buildup in that grease on that heat exchanger, we don't want that thing. Turning on because that's a serious fire hazard, okay, again big picture stuff guys, you don't just go in there with a a one-track, mind and say it's iced up and you know, move on you. You look at everything.

I treat it like it's the first time i've been to this location. I treat this customer like they're, my parents, you know i i try to take care of them be honest and up front, because my hope is is that i continue to work with this customer for years and years and years to come. Okay, it's not worth it for me to make a quick buck today. So that way, i don't get to work for them tomorrow.

Okay, so i'm always trying to be open and honest and of course i need to make a profit, but i'm trying not to gouge my customers. You know i never want to be um not truthful to them. I never want to be shady um. You know i try to be fair, open and honest with them at all times.

Um - and you know i was having a discussion with uh with actually with my dad. Today we were talking as i was driving home from work, and i was just telling him you know. I treat every service call like another. Technician is gon na walk up behind me and start talking crap.

So that's a motivation for me because i don't want anybody to talk crap on my work right so every time i do something i always have that in the back of my head. I don't want someone to come up behind me and have ammunition to talk down on me or talk bad about my service work or anything like that. Now, i'm not perfect and of course i make mistakes, but i always treat every job like that. Okay, don't give other service technicians any fuel to add to the fire, don't give them an excuse to talk crap on you.

Don't do shady work, don't leave stuff uncovered. You know that kind of stuff just try to treat it like someone's going to come behind you and audit your work every single time. You do something it'll just keep you on your toes and make sure you're doing everything properly hey. I really appreciate you guys making it to the end of this video.

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